Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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As someone who was slapped and caned, I know that corporal punishment works – but only when backed up by moral authority

As someone who had his fair share of wallops from schoolteachers – including being slapped, caned and once having my head banged against another kid’s head for the crime of talking in the library – I find myself torn on the school-discipline debate. Part of me hates the idea of teachers using force against children, even if it is only the “reasonable force” permitted by the Department of Education’s rewritten rulebook for teachers. Yet another part of me recognises that teachers can’t do their job properly if there are cocky children effing and blinding or swinging from the light fittings. What’s the solution?

The problem with Michael Gove’s tentative lifting of the “no touch” rule and his nod to teachers to use “reasonable force” against the most disruptive pupils is that it treats discipline as a purely physical thing. It imagines that the authority of teachers in schools can be re-established simply by allowing them occasionally to grab children by the scruffs of their necks and eject them from the classroom. Yet the crisis of authority in schools, the inability of the modern teaching profession to exercise true dominion over its charges, is the product of a far more profound moral and existential problem than the ban on teachers hitting kids. Rather, it speaks to the devaluation of knowledge itself, to the society-wide denigration of adult authority, to the PC celebration of the nonsense notion that, all views being “equally valid”, children have just as much to teach us as we have to teach them. It is this erosion over the past 20 years of respect for traditional knowledge and of the moral line between adults and children which has nurtured a scenario where no one knows who is really in control in the classroom.

Allowing teachers to grab naughty children and banish them to the corridor or the headmaster’s office won’t do anything to address this quake in intergenerational relations. In fact, it could end up making things worse, by creating a situation where teachers who have not won respect on the basis of what they know, on the basis that they are morally and knowledgeably superior to the next generation and therefore that the next generation ought to pay attention to them, will instead try to win respect through physical menace. Yet when I got hit back in the bad old days, the reason those clouts made an impact was not only because they hurt but also because of who was delivering them – some man or woman or nun whom I recognised as a figure of authority, of wisdom and nous. It was their moral status which gave their physical force its power. Take that moral status away and it would just have been some crazy-eyed 60-year-old woman, probably bitter as a result of having spent her adult life in a convent, knocking about an eight-year-old kid.

The pressing question that needs to be addressed is the moral standing of teachers, and more importantly the moral standing of knowledge, truth and adult society itself. Otherwise there’s the danger that force becomes, not an extension of teachers’ authority in the classroom, but a substitute for it. Nothing is more likely to wind up an already wound-up 13-year-old than the feeling that he is being slapped by someone he has no respect for.